FundRaiser Blog

Now that January is coming to a close and end of year letters have been printed and mailed, it’s time to think about other ways in which you can prepare for the upcoming year. Performing some general maintenance tasks will help keep your FundRaiser running smoothly and your donor management process easy.

First, think about the letters you send. With the change in the calendar, you can update the accomplishments or perhaps highlight special stories from the previous year that would resonate with your donors. Updating the letters with new codes will help staff and volunteers alike use the correct letter. And don’t forget to mark your old letters inactive to keep them from being repeated.

The Households module comes with Select and Professional versions of FundRaiser Software and it allows you to group families or organizations together so you can see overall giving for an entire group. Although the module is called Households, it isn’t limited to families. It also works well for organizations, for example to see the giving patterns of a group of people related to a single organization.

So why would you want to create Households?

One of the biggest quandaries you may face when you think about communicating with your donors is to be formal or informal with your greetings. In general, there is a trend to become more informal in our communications. However depending on your organization, you may wish to stay with formal salutations.

Formal salutations use titles such as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Informal salutations are when you address the donor by his or her first name. There are times when each is acceptable, and the salutation may change based on the donor, the event, or the type of correspondence.

For organizations with annual events or campaigns, there are many ways to track the donations that come in each year. From fund and motivation codes to more general category codes, there are a multitude of ways to make sure you know exactly how and why your donors gave to your organization.

Keeping your coding system understandable plays a big role in the effective use of your donor management software. Therefore, when it comes to your annual events, think about using one main code and append then year to it. For example, a gala would be GALA14, GALA15, and so on. This way you would know that all codes that start with “GALA” would be for your annual event. (Or whatever prefix you choose to use for your event.)

It’s that time of year again when we start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions and how to improve ourselves in the coming year. While many people are making resolutions about their health or wellness, it is also a good idea to think about how you can better utilize FundRaiser Software within your organization. There may be larger projects, such as implementing a membership or pledge program that you’re thinking about. But here are three, smaller-scale ideas to get you started.

Resolution 1: Maintain your data entry. A database is only as good as the information that’s inside it. Keeping up with your organization’s data entry allows you to utilize the robust features of FundRaiser to the fullest. With regular maintenance, keeping the data entry current isn’t a big chore and can have big payoffs for your organization.

There’s no doubt that FundRaiser Software is a robust program. As with any program, even if you’ve been using it for a while, there are always new tips and tricks to learn. This is where our wonderful training department can help out.

As part of my training here at FundRaiser support, I attended the training courses (and watched our training videos) that we offer to our customers. While I found each of them informative and helpful in deepening my understanding of the software, I wanted to share with you my three favorite classes.

Most often when people think about technical support they think about error messages and things that aren’t working. And it’s true that even when I evaluate a program to purchase, I think about support as “problem solving”. However, it’s so much more than that.

Here at FundRaiser, we understand that you may need help beyond something technical. Making sure you can use the software to its advantage in order to help your organization is our number one priority. That’s how I think about my job at support—my job is to help you help your organization. And yes, here in support we chase down the occasional error message, but more often it’s about answering questions, providing mini training classes, and offering help and assistance wherever we can.

FundRaiser Software has the ability to track the non-giving aspects of your donors as well as donation information. A great way to do this is to use the category codes features. Each version (Spark, Select, and Professional) of FundRaiser offers unlimited category codes. With an ability to create codes up to eight characters in length, your organization has a nearly unlimited (there’s a limit, but it’s in the billions) to create as many codes as you require.

So in what ways can your organization use codes?

After reading a recent Kim Klein blog, titled Membership vs. Monthly Giving, I wondered whether our users realized that there are multiple choices for giving increments built right into FundRaiser.  And they show up in several places, like Recurring Gift setup, Pledge payment setup, and Membership dues setup, depending on which modules you have, and which ones are active.  Everyone will have the Recurring Gift setup, so let's use that as an example, especially since a recurring gift template can be used for either pledge payments or membership payments, as well as simple frequent givers.

On the Recurring Gifts tab page, you'll see a drop-down code list for "Frequency".  This is where you can choose the normal Monthly or Quarterly or Annual payment periods we're so used to seeing.  But what if some can give more often, or their paychecks come in on a different type of schedule?  Here you'll see the following choices:

One of the most attractive features about FundRaiser Software is its ability to hold a lot of information on your organization’s donors. By the time you utilize category codes and handle such things as Campaigns and Events, Memberships, and Pledges, you can have a lot of donor-specific information. Gathering this information into meaningful groups is the power of groupings inside of FundRaiser.

Let’s say you want to see who attended your events, but hasn’t given a donation. You can make a grouping for that. How about someone who is a monthly donor who has never attended any events? That’s right. You can make a grouping for that.

Sending your year-end appeals doesn’t mean rushing to the post office or worrying about running out of stamps. With FundRaiser, you have the option to send your correspondence through email. This means your organization will save paper and postage and your donors will hear from you more quickly.

Inside FundRaiser the process for sending correspondence through email is much the same as printing the letters. The options you select on the printing window are different.

It’s the time of year when my thoughts turn toward thankfulness and gratitude, though I try to keep them tuned in that direction year round. There are many things that I think we all can be thankful for, but I wanted to take a few moments this week and share with you the five things I’m thankful for in FundRaiser Software.

1) An intuitive interface. FundRaiser holds a lot of data on your donors and organization, which is a good thing. It can also get overwhelming, too. The intuitive way that you can move through FundRaiser allows you to access, sort, and filter, all that data so you can make the best contacts you can with your donors.

So my family had that conversation this weekend. The one that usually happens sometime at the start of November. My mother asked me, “so what do you want for Christmas?”. There’s a good chance similar conversations, centered around any number of the winter holidays, are happening in your donors’ households too.

I’m also hearing from a lot of organizations that are working to send out their holiday appeal letters.

There’s nothing more reassuring to a computer user than to have a good backup of data. This is no less true when it comes to your FundRaiser data. As an organization, there’s a good bet that you keep a large amount of information about your donors. To know that you can restore it in the sad event of a computer failure, is good news indeed.

FundRaiser makes it easy to do backups, by putting the command in an easy to locate place. Under the FILE menu in FundRaiser, choose CREATE A BACKUP. To complete your backup hit the “backup” button. The process will run and once it’s finished, you can choose Exit. Your backup has completed. However, you may have questions about backups and the process. One of the most common is: where do you want to place your backup? FundRaiser conveniently places backups in a default location. (For clients using FundRaiser Hosted, always accept the default location. To receive a copy of the backup, give our technical support team a call and we’ll gladly send you a copy of the files.) Since the restore screen automatically goes to the location of the last backup, you don’t have to worry about where you saved your backup. It is a good idea to backup before doing a major operation such as an import or export. Regular backups can also keep data safe in the event of a computer failure. Set a schedule within your organization and stick to it. It doesn’t take a lot of time to do a backup of your FundRaiser data. Keeping your backups current will save you, and your organization, a lot of time and trouble. Plus, the peace of mind is priceless.

When you set out to learn any new software, it’s like learning to dance where the steps seem familiar, and yet new at the same time. As I begin my second week at FundRaiser Software, I find that the dance becomes more familiar and I can really appreciate the nuances of the program.

One of the things that first impressed me about FundRaiser’s software program was its versatility. My background in nonprofits is with small organizations—really small. For a while back in the 90’s, I worked with our local cage bird club to do rescue for aviary birds like finches and canaries. Eventually we educated those in the area about the smaller birds and the local club was able to pick up the work of finding new homes for any birds in need. It was a me-myself-and-I operation, with help from a few friends. Even for a nonprofit as small as we were back then, I think FundRaiser’s membership function would have been very helpful. That would have been so much easier than the Excel spreadsheets I was using to track renewals and to print labels for the newsletter mailings.

Hi Everybody! The name is Nick and if you've called for FundRaiser Tech Support in the last year or so you've probably talked to me, and if not, then what's stopping you?Anyway, today I would like to talk about the best way to import data into FundRaiser and the mythically obscure .CSV file ... scary. Now, you may or may not be asking yourself. "Awesome Nick, how do I create a .CSV without summoning potentially evil spirits?"

Well, first things first, open up your spreadsheet in Excel. Most of the time it will be saved as an Excel Workbook or some other file useless to FundRaiser. Now, go to "Save As" this will open the "Save As" window. On the bottom of the "Save As" window you will see a drop menu that says "Save As type." Now this part is crucial, click on the drop down menu.

Note from Sasha: I have worked with Robert L. Weiner at the TechSoup forums where we have both been volunteer forum moderators in the database and software section for many years. Come visit us there sometime! Over the years, I've come to respect his depth of knowledge and skill at sharing about best practices for using donor databases. This article by him is one of my favorites. Robert is an independent technological consultant to non-profits and is not affiliated with FundRaiser Software. I'm sharing the article because I believe it is one of the most concisely helpful resources written on the subject of donor database best practices, and that FundRaiser users will benefit from reading it.

After people, data is your most important asset.-- John Kenyon

The brilliant colors of Fall have moved from the trees to the ground.  Bright confetti of red, orange, and yellow leaves litters the road and yards.  The smell of fallen foliage is rich and brings back childhood memories of jumping into piles of crunchy, newly raked leaves.  The summer complement of flying bugs is gone leaving only a few industrious honeybees to visit the few yellow flowers left on my dying tomato plants. 

We have had our little foundling kitten, Mab, for nearly two months now.  She’s a very different creature than the starved little waif who showed up on our doorstep.  She has become our fat little porch guardian, content to curl up on the step and sleep in the sun or hover just out of reach when we try to pet her.  It’s amazing the difference regular feeding makes.

The Ozarks have put on a truly breathtaking show this Fall.  I have never seen colors so vivid.  The trees stand boldly clad in crimson and gold.  Ruby vines twine around trunks and gently swing from branches like expensive jewelry.  Even when clouds darken the sky, the colors continue to glow as if lit from within.

Color is such an important part of our lives.  Naming colors is one of the first things we learn as children.  Since color is a near universal language, stemming from somewhere deep in our primeval history, we can use color to communicate many things without words.  Red usually means stop or danger, yellow inspires caution or attention, and green suggests going ahead.  Like most people, I suspect, I don’t even have to think about these impressions, they are just there.

Winter is on its way here in the Ozarks.  The trees are putting on their bright end of year party dresses, the morning glories, who stood unruffled in 100+ temperatures, wilt in the cooler temperatures, and the squirrels bury their bounty here and there in frenzied anticipation of the deep cold.  Perhaps we’ll even have a winter this year.

It is time for me to think about putting up our bird feeder.  This will be our first winter here and I am eager to see what kind of visitors we get.  There are always the bright cardinals and the pushy blue jays.   These birds are entertaining but somehow I find myself enjoying the quieter finches and woodpeckers more.   Some of our summer birds are already gone.  The robins are few and far between, the hummingbirds no longer zip and fight from one flower to the next, and tiny grey birds can be seen practicing their formations for the long flight south.  Soon they will be gone and the others who have stayed hidden in the greenery of summer will come out to be seen.